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Product Description

Dropcam HD Internet Wi-Fi Video Monitoring Cameras help you watch what you love from anywhere. In less than a minute, you'll have it setup and securely streaming video to you over your home Wi-Fi. Use it to watch your home, your baby, the dog, and your small business. Every camera comes with Night vision, 720p HD video, two-way audio, and Digital Pan and Zoom. Paired with secure online DVR recording, you can watch live and recorded video from anywhere on any device. Dropcam HD makes monitoring what you love and finding peace of mind easier than ever. Watch from any device such as your Apple Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Android. All you need is a Wi-Fi network paired with the free and easy-to-use Dropcam App. Watch what you love while away with Dropcam HD.

From the Manufacturer

Dropcam

Dropcam + Nest Protect

When a safety event occurs (smoke or CO is detected):> Cameras in your home turn on automatically> A clip is generated and saved automatically during an event, even if you’re not a subscriber> User receives a notification of the event on their mobile device> Event is added to your activity feed and Cloud Recording timeline (as applicable)

Dropcam + Nest Thernostat

When a user manually sets Away/Home mode:> Alerts turn on or off, respectively> Cameras turn on or off, respectively

Meet Dropcam

Dropcam is a cloud-based Wi-Fi video monitoring service that helps you stay connected to places, people and pets. Receive activity alerts on your smartphone, tablet or computer. Add optional Cloud Video Recording (CVR) to access video from the past week or month.

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My review is focus on one aspect so as not to be too long, but still useful. **Please note the updates at the end**

The Dropcam is a very good, very easy to use device. Many of the top rated reviews here do an excellent job of listing the pros and cons. Also, the firmware has been updated since many of the negative reviews were posted, so there have been subtle improvements (not enough) with motion detection, and also the iOS and Android apps are now easy and great.

The best use case of this camera, by far, is indoor remote surveillance of a kids room, a family room, or a workplace.

Here's the real, overpowering negative about the device for me: it uses about 60GB of upload data capacity each month. The camera transmits its HD video feed to the DropCam cloud servers ALL DAY, EVERY DAY. The cloud service is what makes the user experience so easy, and what allows you to view your camera from multiple places, phones, tablets, all with just a userID and password. It's good in that you don't have to learn about firewalls, IP port forwarding and such just to make it work. But, that also means that it sends enormous amounts of video of a room with nothing at all happening in it. If your ISP has a quota or a limit to how much you can send per month, this camera WILL DEFINITELY USE A LARGE PORTION. In Canada and with some US ISPs, the limit is 50GB...i.e. less than this camera sends!

- Lots of ISPs offer a quota of 250GB, so this camera won't put most US customers over their limit. Just know that this will soak up a good portion of your allotment.- Each additional camera will add to the bandwidth you use.- Consider that you are also downloading the video feed from your ISP, so if you are in the same place as the camera viewing it, it doubles the bandwidth used. Yep, that's right, your video goes up to the cloud server, then back down to you.- FYI, the upload rate is about 200 Kbps- The camera does use excellent compression, so the HD video is as compact as it can be in 2012.- If you have anything less than awesome Internet service, the camera will slow down your uploads of other stuff, like photos, attachments, etc. Upload speed is always much slower than download on consumer Internet service, and that's what this camera uses.

So, take this important point into consideration. It may still be a great product for you, but you need to know the costs. For me, I planned on using this at a lake house with slow Internet, so it doesn't work for me. I'll have to find another use for it.

****Update, September 2012The camera has just received a software update that lets you switch between SD mode and HD mode. All DropCams that are turned on and connected to the Internet will get the update automatically. The standard definition mode uses half the bandwidth of the HD mode. Overall, there is a big improvement regarding the problem I cited in my original review. The update has other benefits in motion detection, etc.

As for me, the 30GB a month is still too much, so I will continue to use the available software switch to turn the camera on and off, and only enable it when I want to watch.

****Update, May 2014Dropcam keeps on adding features that improve the camera. This is the upside of a cloud service. They can update features on the cloud, and then you get them, even on your older Dropcam. Lately, they've added ACTIVITY RECOGNITION, which is really great. This means that their servers storing your video can recognize certain patterns that tend to occur on your camera, and then distinguish those patterns going forward. An example would be a camera pointed at a front door with the street in the background. The Dropcam cloud might identify cars moving on the street as one activity, and a person walking up to the door as another, and a person walking away from the door as a third. You can then go into the web site, name the activities, and then set up alerts and search on each individual activity. Thus, you could quickly find all instances of somebody walking up to your door, or get a notification each time it happens. Or you could wonder "What time did the kids leave" and then filter only by people walking away from the door. Good stuff.

Absolutely awesome item! I did research for well over two months for a home monitoring camera, and while there are a ton of options available, I decided to finally pick The Dropcam as my choice. I want to say this right now, if you end up wanting the Dropcam, and you don't mind spending an additional $50.00, get the Dropcam Pro as it's everything this Dropcam is but even better with sound, night vision, etc. I did not need the Pro version, but I did want to say that I thought about it, but am still glad I picked this one and saved the $50.00.

As countless others have said, the setup is incredibly easy with zero issues whatsoever. Plug it into your computer, do the setup, unplug it from your computer, and place it where you wish. The app on the iPhone (and I'm assuming Android devices) works even better than logging into their site on your regular computer. I've had no issues with viewing live footage or recorded footage from anywhere I have been.

I love how you can easily make clips from their site. I've only used it twice (cats are very strange when you are not home, I have discovered!), but it allows you to make great footage to view later or send to people.

I love the alert system. I have it setup to send push notifications to my phone when it detects something. I keep the camera off if I'm home, but every time I walk back in the door, my phone gets a push notification saying it detected movement, and I also get them when one of the two cats walks by. I feel completely valid in saying that if someone were to come in uninvited, it would send me a notification with no issues.

I do want to talk about the one knock most people give this, and it is absolutely valid to a point. If you want seven days saved of recorded video on their servers, it's $9.99 per month. It has NO local storage for footage. This, for some people, is huge, and I respect and understand that. If you require local storage or don't want to pay the $9.99 per month, then, yes, this camera may not be for you unless you only want live footage (which is free). I truly believe that if they even lowered it to $5.99 per month, it would draw in many more people. For me, though, the $9.99 is not an issue, and I enjoy having the seven days worth of footage. I hope, as you do with a seat belt, I never need it, but I like having it.

The camera design itself is far more sturdy than the pictures of it look. The camera is just the black 'puck' you see in the photos, and it comes out of the stand if you wish. The stand feels extremely sturdy and metal, and I have no issues with it moving around or sliding on the desk I have it on. If you want to mount it somewhere, you can do that, too.

The only real negatives that come to mind are, first, the speaker. It does work. You can turn it on and talk through your smart phone to the camera; however, as others have noted, it IS of, at best, average quality. You can hear people just fine both live and on recorded footage, but talking through it requires the person listening to be within a few feet of it to truly be able to understand what it is being said, at least in my experience. The only other 'negative' is the actual website itself. It looks great, is easy to use the minute you log in to it, but for some reason it randomly stops displaying video from the camera even though I am sitting right next to the camera on my computer. To get the footage to come back up, I have to return to their main page and go back to my profile and pull the camera up again. This is not constant, but it does happen somewhat on a regular basis. This issue does not at all crop up on the smart phone app. I've had zero issues with that.

I'm sure that I've missed some things, but I do highly recommend the Dropcam. It was worth the price, and, for me, the monthly payment is worth it. I do think they would actually end up making MORE money if they lowered the price of the monthly recording. Also, as I said at the top, if you are set on getting this camera and simply do not care about an additional fifty dollars, grab the Pro model as I've heard it's this camera but on steroids. For me, I didn't need it, but it would be worth checking out.

When I first bought this the camera provided good results, easy to set-up, easy to monitor on the website interface, easy to deal with archived clips, very good iPhone app that would send alerts if there was movement in the field of view. Ever since Nest/Google bought Dropcam and they re-did the iPhone app and website I can no longer recommend this product which is sad.

First the iPhone app used to use GPS to automatically turn on/off the Dropcam when I left or returned home. It no longer does that as the app cannot figure out if your out or at home. Part of the problem is that they use WiFi for location services instead of just GPS so if your iPhone tries to connect to a WiFi network outside the home it thinks you're home and switches the camera off. I've written to them about this and despite several revisions of iOS software the bug remains to deafening poor reviews in the app store.

Second, Nest redesigned the website so it's so laden with software it barely works if at all. They turned a simple interface into idiot buttons with no labels or mouseover text to indicate what the controls do. And everything on the website is slow, slow, slow.

I will not be renewing my subscription for this sub-standard performance. I don't have any hope for them as every change they have made has been for the worse despite howls of complaints from the users. They just don't listen and don't care.

UPDATE (10/21/15)I upped the review by one star once I figured-out that it's best to keep using the Dropcam iOS app. Using the Nest app, which they recommend, just leads to a world hurt in how broken it is. The Dropcam app works properly and the geolocation bugs seem to have been fixed. I still ding stars off of it because the interface isn't as good as it used to be.